Not So Far
Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative
by Michael Novak
Random House, 2013
(316 pages, $24.00, hardcover)
reviewed by John C. Chalberg
For better than half a century Michael Novak has appeared to be a man on the move. Born and raised in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he has studied and taught on both American coasts and abroad. Once a Kennedy Democrat, he wound up a Reaganite, if not exactly a Reagan Republican. And once taken for a man of the religious left, Catholic variety, he eventually came to be regarded as a man on the religious right.
Yet in many key respects the young Michael Novak is the same man who has now taken time to let a lifetime of memories flood back into view. If the young man defended his church and his country, as well as some version of liberal capitalism and of American exceptionalism, the older man has also defended all these things.
So if Novak has really changed little, why does it appear that he moved significantly from left to right? Maybe a good part of the answer is that the country has been on quite a journey, while Novak has remained pretty much the same. But then what about his position with respect to the Catholic Church? Here one could say that while the Catholic Church has remained just what it has always been, this has never prevented Catholics on the left from hoping it would change, or, indeed, expecting it to do so imminently. Nor did it long ago stop some among them from assuming what they never should have assumed, namely, that Michael Novak shared their hopes and vision.
A Core in Faith & Politics
Yet Novak himself in this book makes a case for having once been a man of the left, and he insists that his initial movement from left to right began with religion, not politics. More specifically, it began in the 1960s, in the midst of Vatican II. And yet even then Novak was suspicious of what he labels a "simpleminded" rejection of tradition in the name of something called progress. To him, who was and remains a man of deep and abiding faith, the true "spirit of Vatican II" was an attempt to get at the "living core" of Catholic tradition. As such, this "spirit" was quite traditionalist. In fact, it was more traditionalist than the views of many conservatives of that era, who, according to Novak, managed to look no further back than the "most recent four centuries."
In Novak's view, the true progressives at Vatican II were such figures as Bishop Karol Wojtyla and the priest-theologian Joseph Ratzinger. And like G. K. Chesterton before him, Novak argues that any meaningful progress must be grounded in respect for tradition. Today's progressives look upon both tradition and the authority of the church hierarchy with "considerable hostility," but it was not so, he asserts, with the "true progressives" of Vatican II. In short, Michael Novak was an ally of the Wojtylas and the Ratzingers way back when, and he remains so today.
With respect to American politics, Novak grew up in a family of ethnic, working-class Democrats, and he retains a soft spot for the party of his youth. In fact, he still thinks of himself as a Democrat, despite the fact that, like Ronald Reagan, he thinks that the party left him; he didn't leave it.
Of course, even the young Michael Novak had differences with his party. The origins of those differences can be traced to the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. But the same was true of many Kennedy Democrats, including Robert F. Kennedy himself.
Like them, Novak signed on to the antiwar movement. But opposed as he was to the war in Vietnam—he couldn't even bring himself to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968—he found himself more critical of the antiwar movement than of the war itself. Many of his compatriots were not just antiwar but anti-American as well. They denied American exceptionalism and debunked the notion that the United States was a force for good in the world. Many were also anti-anti-communists. Michael Novak was none of those things.
John C. Chalberg writes from Minnesota.
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